At least 40 people were killed at a Shiite funeral in a southern Iraqi town on Sunday after a suicide bomber blast brought down the ceiling of a mosque. Dozens more were wounded in that incident and in other attacks in Iraq amid the unceasing violence.

Around 50 people survived the funeral blast in Mussayab, 60km (40
miles) south of the capital Baghdad, with various injuries,
Reuters reported. However, local police said more bodies remain
trapped beneath the rubble in the bombed-out mosque.

“Until now, we are trying to retrieve bodies from under the
debris. Most of the bodies were torn to pieces. Legs and hands
were scattered on ground,” a policeman at the scene told the
news agency.

The people at the funeral were said to be mourning the death of a
man earlier killed by militants.

No group has immediately claimed responsibility for the bombing,
which is the latest in a string of attacks targeting places of
worship and funerals of both Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq. One
such recent chain of bombings killed at least 96 people in the Baghdad suburb of
Sadr City.

Meanwhile, up to six people were killed and more than 60 wounded
in a series of explosions in the city of Arbil, the capital of
Iraq’s autonomous region of Kurdistan, according to the Kurdish
region’s health minister Raykot Hama Rashid.

A statement from the Kurdish security service Asayesh said a
suicide bomber detonated explosives at the entrance to their
Arbil headquarters. Asayesh forces then clashed with four more
bombers, killing them, but the fight was followed by a blast of
an explosives-rigged ambulance triggered by another insurgent.

The media has described the incident as rare, as the Sunday
blasts were the first to hit Arbil since May 2007.

But Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki’s spokesman has linked
the deadly attack to the raging conflict in neighboring Syria,
where Kurdish forces have been fighting with jihadist groups.

“Syria has affected all of us,” the spokesman told AFP,
adding that the attack may be “one of the offshoots of the
Syrian crisis”.

Both Iraq’s Sunnis and Shias have been crossing into Syria to
fight on opposite sides of the conflict.

This includes the terrorist groups, with al-Qaeda’s Iraqi and
Syrian branches merging earlier this year to form the Islamic
State of Iraq and the Levant, which has claimed responsibility
for attacks – suicide bombings in particular – on both sides of
the border.

More than 6,000 people have been killed in violent attacks in
Iraq since the start of the year, according to monitoring group
Iraq Body Count.